


Queens of the Marsh

by jadelennox



Category: Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: Female Character of Color, Gen, Male Character of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadelennox/pseuds/jadelennox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We get so used to fighting the bad guys that we see them everywhere. But this is just for school, right? Normal things like rising yeast levels in the wet-meadow-not-a-swamp. Maybe we don't need to look for alien influence in everything we do?"</p><p>"I'm not looking for alien influence in the yeast levels," said Rani, pointing at what looked like a pillar emerging from the dimness in front of them. "I'm looking for alien influence in that."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queens of the Marsh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/gifts).



> Thanks so much to kake for the quick beta!
> 
> [](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/)  
> This work by jadelennox is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/).

In the changing room, three monstrous figures slowly divested themselves of the pieces of their bright yellow Tyvek suits, revealing the lab workers within.

"Jin didn't turn up for work today," said the shorter of the two women, her brow furrowed in concern. "Did either of you hear from him?"

The man shook his head, tossing his gear down a chute. "Sorry, Emily. I haven't seen him since the pop quiz on Friday."

The taller woman frowned. "I've not seen him, either. What is it with people quitting this job with no notice?"

"I don't think he would have quit, Yas" said Emily. "I know he needed the cash."

"He found another job, then." Yas shrugged. "He must've told Dr. Usher, though. She didn't seem bothered we were a man down."

"Wasn't her doing the work, was it?" The man washed up in the tiny sink. "Fancy a pint?"

"Sounds good," said Yas. "Coming, Emily?"

"I'll be right behind you," Emily said, and her coworkers shrugged and went on ahead, leaving the concerns of another workday behind them. Emily stared into space for several long moments before sighing, tossing her own gear down the chute, and following.

* * *

"What's going on in the world, Mr. Smith?" asked Clyde, as he, Rani, and Sky trooped up into the attic. He threw himself theatrically back into a chair.

Sky bounded forward and wrapped her arms around Sarah Jane's waist. "Hello, Mum!"

"Hello, darling. Clyde, Rani, good to see you. Good day?"

"No day is genuinely good unless it's a day without maths," said Clyde. "But we survived."

"No alien invasions," said Rani, accepting a mug of tea from Sarah Jane. "Thanks, Sarah Jane, that's brilliant."

"There are indeed no alien invasions in Earth's solar system today." Mr. Smith's colours swirled as he spoke. "Clyde, do you have any further parameters for your query?"

Clyde grinned, wrapping his hands around his own mug of tea. "World too busy for a quick summary, Mr. Smith? How about restricting it to London?"

"Don't be silly," said Sky. "London is the 15th most highly populated city on the planet, with 7.8 million people. Mr. Smith, restrict the parameters of Clyde's query to Ealing."

"Very well, Sky." If Mr. Smith's electronic voice were tinged with humour, well, nobody was going to call him on it. "There's an open poetry event beginning at the library. Several of the ponds at Islip Manor Meadows are showing increased yeast levels. Madame Maureen, noted meditation expert, will be leading a class on--"

"That's it," interrupted Rani. "Mr. Smith, what was the yeast one again?"

"Several of the ponds at Islip Manor Meadows are showing increased yeast levels."

"Sure you aren't interested in _Madame Maureen_?"

Rani shot Clyde a dirty look. "I need a project for science. That sounds like a good one."

"Lovely," said Sarah Jane. "And in that case, Mr. Smith, please leave Rani to do all the work on her own."

"Oi! I wasn't planning on cheating."

Sarah Jane put her arm around Rani. "Of course you weren't. But Mr. Smith might not realise he's not supposed to be proactively helpful."

Later, with homework spread out over Sarah Jane's table, Clyde asked, "Why d'you care so much about a science fair project, anyway? Is it because Luke won that geek prize last year?"

"First off, the National Science & Engineering Competition is not a 'geek prize.' Secondly, this has nothing to do with Luke, and you're the one always trying to impress him, not me."

Clyde grinned. "I don't need to impress Luke. He's the one who's impressed with my manly prowess."

Rani choked down a laugh. "Right, master of prowess, that's you." She pointedly looked at the papers in front of him, where instead of revising for his geography exam he was doodling superheroes in the margins of his notes.

He hastily slid his geography text so it covered the drawings. "So why the pond yeast?"

"A good journalist needs to be able to understand and explain things outside her own areas of expertise."

Sarah Jane leaned in from the kitchen, where she was making dinner for Sky. "Exactly, Rani. Think about some science journalists you admire, like Ben Goldacre or Rebecca Skloot. They did their research by talking to professional scientists and reframing for laypeople. If you talk to the biologists at the Meadows, you'll be starting off just like a journalist."

"Skloot? Is that some new kind of Slitheen?"

Rani reached out to smack Clyde on the head, and he ducked. "Do you want to come with me or not, Clyde?"

"Love to, but can't. No, seriously, I would," he protested, as Rani glared. "But I have a... thing."

Sky, on the settee, looked up from her copy of Skellig. "What kind of thing, Clyde?"

"Never mind," said Rani, getting up. She put her arm around Sky. "It means he doesn't want to tell us."

It was late, the sky gone dark, when Rani knocked on the door of 2 Renfrow Street. Clyde's mum answered the door, her face lighting up.

"Rani! It's good to see you."

Rani smiled. "It's good to see you, too, Mrs. Langer. Is Clyde in?"

In answer, Carla held the door open for her. Rani slipped in and headed toward Clyde's room.

"Don't stay too late," Carla called after her. "It's a school night."

Clyde was frantically stuffing some papers into a large portfolio when Rani got to his room. "What's up?" he asked, sliding the portfolio behind his bed. "You didn't text to say you were coming."

Rani ignored him. If she paid attention every time Clyde did something strange, well. A good journalist needed to know that sometimes things that seemed unusual were just teenage boys being teenage boys. Besides, she had important things to worry about. "I need you to come with me, now."

He was up in a heartbeat, reaching for the trainers piled haphazardly under his desk. "Sarah Jane? Sky?"

"They're fine," she said. "Everyone is fine. But you have to see this."

He breathed out, his shoulders relaxing visibly as she spoke. "In that case, do you have time to explain where we're going?"

"Islip Manor Meadows. Bring your sketchbook."

* * *

"Ugh," said Clyde, as they slogged through the marshy grass in the dark. "I thought this was a park."

"It's a nature reserve and a wet meadow," said Rani.

Clyde pulled one foot out of the mud with a sucking pop. "That's obvious, isn't it?"

"No, it's a botanical term. Wet meadow, I mean. It means something like _not as damp as a swamp._ "

Clyde turned to stare at her, though she was illuminated only by the gibbous moon. "Really?"

She shrugged. "When I talked to the scientists earlier today, they gave me all sorts of pamphlets. It has to do with poor drainage, and being in a riparian zone, and how we have some excellent specimens of marsh cudweed. But I'm trying to be a good journalist and present the material at a level appropriate for my audience."

"So I get _not as damp as a swamp_ from all that?"

Rani snickered, and after a moment, Clyde laughed, too.

"Why are we doing this?" he asked, after a few more minutes of walking through the dark.

"You'll see in just a minute," Rani said. "It's... It's bad."

"Sometimes it's hard not to see aliens everywhere," said Clyde, after a beat. "We get so used to fighting the bad guys that we see them everywhere. But this is just for school, right? Normal things like rising yeast levels in the wet-meadow-not-a-swamp. Maybe we don't need to look for alien influence in everything we do?"

"I'm not looking for alien influence in the yeast levels," said Rani, pointing at what looked like a pillar emerging from the dimness in front of them. "I'm looking for alien influence in _that_."

Clyde took one step closer, then two. The pillar resolved itself into some kind of barred enclosure. He leaned forward, and then leapt back with a yelp as the three frogmen inside, each two metres tall, started banging on the bars and making some kind of horrible croaking sound.

He grabbed Rani's hand and squeezed. She squeezed back. "Oh," he said. "All right. That one's probably alien, yeah."

* * *

"Why aren't we telling Sarah Jane about this?" whispered Clyde, as he obeyed Rani's order to draw the cage and its inhabitants. "Froggy aliens, after all. Won't she want to know?"

Rani shone a tiny LED torch at his sketchbook, careful to keep the light shielded. "She told me to work on this without help."

"Yeah, when she thought it was about _yeast_. Now it's about giant alien frogs." He paused. "Wait, that doesn't make sense. You're worried about working alone in order to impress Sarah Jane, but you still came to get me."

Rani coughed. "Right. I'm sure Sarah Jane meant Clyde Langer when she told me not to cheat at _science_."

"Hey! If that's how you feel, why'd you ask me to help?"

"So we have your drawing to look at later when we're trying to figure out what kind of aliens they are."

"There's a camera on your phone."

"Fine." She gestured wildly, then quickly brought the torch back under the cover of her other hand. "Because I'm not so stupid as to sneak up on imprisoned aliens alone. And also I do think your drawings capture something that a photograph might not."

Clyde's eyes widened and he glanced at her briefly before staring resolutely back at the sketchbook.

"Maybe we'll be able to show your drawing to Sarah Jane and Mr. Smith," Rani continued. "But there's no point in waking Sarah Jane up before we even know what we're up against."

He put down his pencil and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. "She didn't think you were going to cheat. She was just being a mum." After a beat, she nodded, not looking at him. He rambled on, as if unconcerned. "How'd you find the frogmen from Mars?"

She pointed over the rise in front of them, a dark shadow barely visible against London's light pollution. "The biologists' station is just over the rise. I talked to a few of the junior techs on the project, and thought I'd have a look round--"

"Snoop."

"A _look_. And there's a fence up on the hill, the kind you can't see through."

Clyde laughed quietly, but put away his drawing and advanced on the slope. "And that meant there was something worth snooping into."

"Worth _investigating_. I thought so. And I was right!" They were still whispering, but Rani's voice was starting to rise.

"Wait," he said, thinking her story through. "Wouldn't they have fenced the whole thing? We didn't climb over a fence to get here."

"Er. Well." She shrugged her shoulders. "They clearly didn't expect someone to walk through the swamp."

"It _was_ a swamp! I told you--"

There was a brief clatter of noise from the hill in front of them, and they both fell silent. Long moments passed. They said nothing, but crouched, shivering, in the damp grass.

The silence stretched on. At last, Clyde turned to Rani. _Keep going?_ he mouthed at her. She nodded, and took a step forward, only to fall back with a cry when a light shone directly in their faces.

"I don't know why I keep bothering with this miserable planet," said a woman's voice out of the glare. "Far more trouble than its meagre biochemical resources could possibly justify. You two, come with me." The light source shifted just enough for them to see a woman holding a torch in one hand -- and a ray gun in the other.

* * *

In the cottage that made up the biologists' station, the strange woman tied them to chairs with quick, efficient movements. The bindings were some kind of shining liquid-like metal, gleaming like mercury but with no give at all.

"Who are you and why were you snooping around my research?"

" _Your_ research?" Clyde leaned forward, almost tipping his chair into the tiny but spotless conference table in front of him. "You totally admitted to being an alien."

The woman sighed like a teacher with a particularly dim student. "Yes, and this is also my research."

Rani lifted one eyebrow. "You're Dr. Usher?"

"For now." The woman took a seat at the table's remaining chair. "And now you have the advantage of me."

"Rani Chandra and Clyde Langer," said Rani.

"Yeah, and we're totally used to tangling with aliens, so you don't want to mess with us," said Clyde.

" _Clyde_ ," hissed Rani.

Dr. Usher ignored Clyde's outburst in favour of staring at Rani over the table. A slow, superior smile spread across her face. "You've got my attention, _Rani_ Chandra. Enough to give you the opportunity to explain why I should allow you to continue in your current --" She curled a lip. "-- humanity."

"Because you need our help," said Rani.

Dr. Usher's eyebrows rose so high they almost vanished behind her hairline. "How could I possibly need your help?"

"Because you didn't plan for those frog aliens," said Rani. "They were a problem and you need it fixed."

"And how do you know that, _Rani_?"

"Stop saying her name like that," said Clyde, glaring.

"Look in Clyde's sketchbook," said Rani.

Dr. Usher stared hard at Rani for a moment, and reached into the corner where she'd tossed Clyde's satchel. She tossed the sketchbook on the table.

"Look at the most recent page," Rani ordered.

Dr. Usher flipped open the sketchbook to see Clyde's frog drawing was the first and only page. The spiral binding of the sketchbook held the neatly trimmed fringe left behind after earlier pages had been cut out.

"So he drew my creatures," sneered Dr. Usher. "What does that prove?"

Rani squared her shoulders as best she could while tied to a chair. "You never intended to have those creatures to cage up. Look at how technologically advanced you are." She gestured with her chin at the doctor's zippy little alien ray gun, rattled her wrists in their strange bindings. "Now look at that drawing."

Dr. Usher wrinkled her brow at the sketchbook, but it was Clyde, after a moment, who said, "The cage is lashed together out of spare parts!"

"I didn't notice until I was holding the light and watching you draw, Clyde," said Rani. "But that's not a high-tech cage, and it's not an Earth one, either. That's, I don't know, spaceship parts or something, all tied together with more of this stuff." She yanked her wrist against its bindings. "If you'd intentionally been bringing alien frogs here for some reason, you wouldn't have them stashed in a makeshift cell in the middle of an unfenced bit of meadow where any schoolkid could find them."

She finished her speech and held Dr. Usher's gaze, lips tight. Several seconds ticked by in silence. Finally Dr. Usher barked a laugh.

"You're right and you're wrong." She slammed Clyde's sketchbook shut. "They weren't intentional, but they are Earth-origin. One of my experiments has gone wrong, and my human assistants are mutating. It's throwing me decades behind schedule, but until I figure out what's happening I can't correct the equations."

"Those were human?" asked Clyde.

"That's horrible!" said Rani.

"Lesser creatures are a reasonable sacrifice for scientific progress. But I need to change them back to track the logarithmic rates of genetic decline, and unless you have access to a nearby crystalline sentient supercomputer, I'm afraid you can't help me." She raised her ray gun again. "I'm afraid I'll have to kill you after all, Ms. Chandra. And friend."

Rani and Clyde exchanged a look.

 _I don't want to help a lunatic who turns people into frogs,_ Clyde's seemed to be saying.

 _She wants to **kill** us,_ Rani's look said back, plain as day.

"Dr. Usher," said Rani. "I think we can help you."

* * *

 _Three Days Later_

Sarah Jane looked at the fully human forms of the lab techs lying asleep on her attic floor. "Mr. Smith, have these people been restored?"

"Yes, Sarah Jane. They read as genetically _homo sapiens_ with no unexpected epigenetic divergences. Chromatin remodelling has been reversed."

"And Dr. Usher's results are as she requires?"

"Yes, Sarah Jane, and I've delivered them to her ship."

Sarah Jane turned to glare at Dr. Usher. "Then get off our planet and never return."

Dr. Usher raised one eyebrow and looked down her nose at Sarah Jane. "That's hardly up to the likes of you. But because I appreciate the help of this young lady, I will not return in her lifetime."

Rani looked wary. "Er. Thank you?"

"You might be meant for greater things than this planet can offer," said Dr. Usher, waving dismissively at Sarah Jane, Clyde, and all the attic contained. "I feel I could use a laboratory assistant, one who can be trusted. Would you care to travel with me?"

"Hey!" Clyde started forward, but Rani held out an arm to stop him.

"Thanks, but no thanks," she said. "I'm happy where I am."

"Your loss," said Dr. Usher, and turned to the door. "But you may nonetheless call me by my name: the Rani." She strode out, leaving three bemused humans behind her.

"I'm sure I've heard that name before," said Sarah Jane.

Rani widened her eyes. "Because it's _mine_?"

"Oh," cried Clyde. "I forgot to tell you, in all the--" He waved a hand at the sleeping former frogmen. "You know how I've been busy a lot?" They nodded. "Anyway. So, um." He stopped, dropping his eyes.

"Spill it, or I'll thwack you," Rani said. "I just saved the Earth from an evil scientist; you have to tell me what's been going on with you."

"Yeah," said Clyde. "Well, I was filling out a portfolio, and going for interviews, and. Well. I got accepted for my Foundation Course in Art and Design for next year. At Stourbridge."

Sarah Jane clapped her hands together. "Clyde!"

"Seriously?" asked Rani.

He looked up at her. "Seriously."

She lunged at him and grabbed him around the waist. "Seriously!"

"Clyde, you're going to be a fine artist," said Sarah Jane.

"Bugger that," said Clyde. "Excuse me, Sarah Jane. But I'm going to draw comic books."

"About giant frog men," giggled Rani.

"Who travel through space and time!"

"Studying pond yeast."

"By moonlight."

"With the help of a supercomputer."

And then the chemists, waking, groaned a little on the floor, and the grand plans for Clyde's career were put on hold for a short while whilst the trio returned to what they did best: saving the Earth.


End file.
